A pro-Palestinian protest action briefly blocked all traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco Wednesday morning.
Starting at about 7:45 a.m. Protesters stopped cars and stretched banners across the roadway denouncing Israel’s bombing of Rafah in the Gaza Strip and demanding that the U.S. stop arming Israel.
Northbound and southbound traffic on the bridge was at a standstill as of 8 a.m.
Wait, do you think people continuing to drive would somehow cause more Palestinian deaths? Is that what you are claiming? You do know the vehicles are not carrying weapons for Israel or anything like that?
The fact is, this protest saved not one life. It changed no one’s mind. It accomplished nothing but making a lot of people have a bad day.
deliberately misunderstanding the point of protests doesn’t make you look smarter than the protesters.
The problem with a lot of protests is the protesters don’t understand the point of a protest.
Sometimes people get so emotional over a cause they can’t understand things from the perspective of other people.
So they end up coming off like selfish crazy people which at best convinces no one, and at worst turns people against their cause.
Many times protests are just about people wanting to be around other people that share their emotions about the cause. This results in a need to find an outlet for these emotions. But because it’s an emotional thing they can’t think out a logical way to further their cause. So instead it’s just about expressing emotion. Which may be cathartic for the protesters but doesn’t do anything to further the cause.
Israel is obviously not going to stop until they get the hostages back. Blocking bridges won’t change anything. It’s just unnecessarily inconveniencing people and only serves to make people think Palestinian movement is an irrational movement that doesn’t care about anything other than themselves.
I’d argue there are no “rational” protests because protests only exist when there is no path to a legal or democratic resolution available.
You don’t protest your landlord fixing your broken heating because there’s laws saying they have to. You don’t protest the elected government, you protest when the elected government breaks the law without recourse.
I don’t think you understand what democracy is. Protest is a right in a democracy, because it can lead to positive change. It’s part of the process. A protest can influence elected leaders.
Emotional protests are poorly thought out and can often lead to negative outcomes. You of course have a right to do an emotional protest, but you aren’t accomplishing anything.
The Palestinian protests are the worst thought out protests I’ve ever seen. We just had one this week where I live and they protested a hospital founded by Canadian Jews. So everyone rightly condemned the protest as antisemitic and it didn’t help their cause at all. But I guess they got to spend some time with others that are upset by the same thing they’re upset about, that seems to be the only thing that’s important to them.
Protest is only a right in a democracy because of… well… protest lol. If they banned protests they’d get worse protests than if they didn’t, or else they have to murder dissidents (See Russia)
If we could’ve voted to end the war in Iraq, there would have been no protests about ending the war in Iraq because people would have just gone to the polls.
What do you think the point of a protest is?
Depends.
The point of a rational protest is to raise awareness and support for a cause. Potentially influence people in power to change policy.
The point of an emotional protest is to simply express emotion without any consideration of achieving any goal.
They Palestinian protests are of the second type. Which is the type of protest that can boil over into violent outbursts which is concerning. Not that violent outbursts will change anything either, no one is going to give in intimidation tactics. But people could be hurt by these protesters.
INB4 the “but they don’t hurt people as bad as Israel is hurting people” crowd, who only prove the point that this is all about emotion and nothing else.
Weird dichotomy.
Protests can be entirely rational without the main motivation being recruitment.
If you think that trolley problem meme accurately reflects the point of the protests, you look pretty stupid.
I was talking about the drivers and driving in the OP article.
Well, I was responding to the meme suggesting that blocking traffic was directly saving lives somehow.